"This
'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered
as a means of communications. The device is inherently of no value
to us."
-An 1876 internal memo at Western Union, responding to Alexander
Graham Bell's offer to sell them his patent on the telephone for
$100,000

"The
talking telegraph is a beautiful thing from a scientific point
of view. . . but if you look at it in a business light, it is
of no importance."
-Elisha Gray, who invented the telephone independently and filed
his patent application a few hours after Alexander Graham Bell

"[The
telephone's] an amazing invention, but who would ever want to
use one of them?"
-Rutherford B. Hayes, 19th President of the United States

"It
is my heart-warmed and world-embracing Christmas hope and aspiration
that all of us, the high, the low, the rich, the poor, the admired,
the despised, the loved, the hated, the civilized, the savage
(every man and brother of us throughout the whole Earth), may
eventually be gathered together in a heaven of everlasting rest
and peace and bliss, except the inventor of the telephone."
-Mark Twain's Christmas greetings, 1890